Dedicated to raising questions and promoting discussion about interesting topics between interesting people.

January 25, 2011

One O'Clock Daily - How our schools fail

Over the last year, I've been tutoring several high school students in my spare time, and teaching in general is something that I've been involved with for far longer, starting from leading lectures and discussions in math and science clubs in my own high school days. So I've seen the public education system in California from many different standpoints—while I was in it as a student, during my time as an undergraduate at Caltech, and yet again, once I had left the formal education system and began working as a R&D engineer and later as a founder of a startup—and the more I see of the system and its effects on its students, the more I grow to dislike it.

At the Kavli Futures Symposium two Saturdays ago, Carver Mead made the point that by any measure, our knowledge base is doubling every ten to fifteen years. That's the world we live in, one where you can't possibly expect to leave any educational program, be it high school, undergraduate, or PhD, with enough skills to last you a lifetime. Instead, the best you can hope for is to leave with the ability to teach yourself new things, and the self knowledge to be able to judge when you have succeeded.

It is at this duty of teaching the ability to teach yourself and its attendant tasks that our school system fails spectacularly. We have, by historical precedent, ended up with a system that takes monolithic textbooks and sets teachers to proceed through them at a rate of one section every day or two, regardless of how much material the students actually comprehend. When a student aces a test, the class moves on the next day. When a student fails a test, the class moves on the next day. With how intricately connected most scientific and mathematical ideas are, should it really be any surprise then that the students who fail the initial tests—who fail to grasp the fundamental ideas of a subject—are more likely to fail tests later on?

And what of the students who pass their tests, or even do well? In the vast majority of cases, these students have only reached a cursory level of understanding of the subject at hand. They have memorized the formulas and vocabulary words, and they can even use these ideas to solve simple problems and to explain simple concepts, but rare is the student who actually understands the material. Rare is the student who knows how to, or even that it is possible to, question the limits of the knowledge they have been presented with. When students learn about the Celcius and Farenheit temperature scales, they take them for gospel, another piece of testament handed down from the teacher on high, and soon to be tested by some pop quiz or final exam. These students might even memorize the formula for converting between Celcius and Farenheit, but few know where that formula comes from, and how one might derive it knowing a few simple points of corresponding temperature in each scale. Fewer still will question the knowledge that they've been given, to try to find its weak points and flaws. They have learned how to measure the temperature of a thing, but not how to take this quantitative knowledge and apply it to simple—yet deep!—questions like "Which of these two things is hotter?", "How much hotter is this thing than that one?", "Can we say that one thing is twice as hot as another?", or "What does it mean to say that something is 'hot' or 'cold'?"

The trouble faced by students in questioning the facts they have been handed is not their fault. It is ours. We have allowed an educational system to come into place that rewards quick belief and celebrates improved test scores. After all, the more quickly you believe something, the sooner you can memorize it, and with the amount of material to be covered each day steadily increasing in this era of AP classes, the speed with which you can memorize facts is vital to getting that A. Any time you have a system that rewards belief over questioning you will encourage people to believe and discourage them from questioning. If these are your expectations—and make no mistake, these are the expectations that I have seen conveyed to the students—you should not be surprised when the students live up to them. That is the cost of standardized tests, and of moving on to the next section like clockwork, regardless of understanding, and that cost is terrible.

Unfortunately, I don't have the solution to this problem. The best I've been able to do is reach out to one student, one person at a time and encourage them to question the facts they've accepted as true. I suspect that it will take us a very long time to adapt our system to encourage the sort of curious thinking that is necessary to be able to teach yourself things and come to a deep understanding of them. In the interim, then, we must each do what we can and not only encourage others down the path of deeper understanding, but we must walk that path ourselves and be an example to those around us by raising questions when they occur to us and thinking deeply about things that others merely pass over and accept.

3 Comments

Questioning comes from curiosity, and curiosity comes from the realization of having an insufficient understanding about something. Our objective as educators, then, is to induce a dissatisfaction with the current level of understanding. As this dissatisfaction stems from genuine interest, we can then consider raising interest rates.

The question, then, is why kids aren't enthralled at the beauty of math or the utility of science. Part of interest comes with experience--you can only be interested in something if you have at least a vague idea of its relevance and importance. Thus, we can induce interest by providing unparalleled experiences, new stimuli that drive creativity and novel thought.

Interest also takes hold in the sight of problems. Some humans, when confronted with certain problems, will feel a responsibility to attempt to solve it. If you accidentally cut yourself, at the very least you'd cry out for help because you're hurting. If your chair breaks, you naturally inspect it to see if you can fix it.

But to those who are not intrigued by problems (and perhaps those who are disinterested altogether), let us define them as "complacent," that is, happy to live without needing to find solutions or deeper meanings behind anything. And I think this complacency, this lack of desire is a huge epidemic that plagues Americans in general.

So maybe it's just semantics and we're talking about the same thing--"inability to question" and "crippling complacency"--but I believe complacency subsumes those who are unable to question. Regarding the questions about temperature, the complacent student simply doesn't care about the answers. They're only interested in video games and sports, movies and TV, friends and Facebook. Thus, it's not a matter of having the ability to question (people can come up with random questions fairly easily) it's just that the answers hold no importance.

(btw if you're interested (!) in further discussion, you can continue it here but ping me via email or something =P too lazy (complacent? hehehe) to RSS this page.)

Also I think an equally important thing to task the youth with- is how to pick which questions to answer, the world is full of things that can be explored, questions unanswered. On any given day, you probably run into 5-10 things that you don't understand- but the goal of the school system is not to turn everyone into deep ponderous thinkers but to give them skills and tools with which to be productive, useful members of society, etc.

It's simply impractical to ask everyone to question everything they don't understand. That's not how everyone wants to live their lives- the key is to teach them to question things that are important and of value to them. To go through the process of thinking through and learning something new- not necessarily to apply this to every aspect of the world around them- which is often how school systems fail to connect with the students, they simply try to teach this process through something that the student's don't see as being important.